Guest Lecture by Dr. Lieba Faier: "Affective Investments in the Manila Mega-Urban Region — The Houses that Filipina Wives in Rural Japan Build"

February 22, 2011

Guest lecture by Dr. Lieba Faier: “Affective Investments in the Manila Mega-Urban Region: The Houses that Filipina Wives in Rural Japan Build”

Dr. Faier’s lecture is the first of the Department of Geography’s spring colloquium series.

ABSTRACT: Dr. Lieba Faier focuses on the houses that Filipina migrants in rural Nagano, Japan, build for themselves and their families in gated communities and other suburban housing developments in the Manila mega-urban region of the Philippines. Scholarly research on gated communities and suburban developments is often focused on how fears of crime and desires for exclusivity influence the making of such housing developments. However, this paper argues for a more complicated understanding of the ways that feelings play in the making of gated and suburban landscapes. Taking a Foucauldian-inspired approach to affect as a power-laden site of subject-making, this paper suggests that the houses that Filipina migrants in rural Japan build in the Manila region involve “affective investments.” That is, these houses are shaped not only by the capitalist practices and state policies that have enabled urban development in the Philippines over the past several decades, but also by the discourses of hope, frustration, shame, fear, desire, and longing through which these migrant women make sense of their transnational lives. By exploring these houses in this way, the lecture will draw attention to the ways transnational formations of gender and affect shape the political economics of gated and suburban space, as well as the ways that the making of such landscapes is enabled by the production of certain kinds of gendered and affective subjects.

Manila mega urban region of the Philippines